Development Director Is a Hot Job. What You Need to Snag This Position

If you’ve been thinking about seeking a job as director of development, you’re in luck. The need for people to fill that role has grown in recent years. In January, LinkedIn listed it as No. 7 on the list of the top 25 Jobs on the Rise in 2025.

But what exactly does it take to become a director of development? In recent reporting, fundraisers told us that career paths in the field aren’t always clear. So the Chronicle reached out to search firms and people serving in the position to learn what the director of development does and what skills fundraisers need to reach this post.

A Title That Means Different Things

People who take on the role of director of development are responsible for creating an organization’s fundraising vision, says Christina Martin Kenny, who has held this title during her career and now runs her own consulting firm, Wit Philanthropy.

“A director of development is largely responsible for setting the organization’s strategy for revenue generation, managing, and stewarding donors,” Martin Kenny says. “They should be the lead position overseeing all of an organization’s fundraising activities. That’s everything from making sure that tax receipts go out on time to donors to meeting with donors, meeting with prospective donors, managing grants if the organization has an active grant portfolio.”

Additional tasks they might oversee, according to Martin Kenny and others: running the annual and year-end giving campaigns, monthly giving programs, and fundraising events. They’re also expected to analyze donor and campaign data and include the organization’s chief executive and board members in fundraising.

Those are a lot of responsibilities. But exactly what a development director does or oversees will be different depending on the size of the organization.

“At a large organization, you can really focus on supporting an executive director to develop an overall revenue strategy and getting out and developing your biggest portfolio,” says Shannon Grass, a partner at EMD Consulting Group, a firm that consults and does talent searches for nonprofits. “But in a midsize or smaller organization, you’re going to really expect a development director who can get real deeply in the weeds about tactics and then zoom out to be a member of the leadership team at 30,000 feet.”

Martin Kenny points out that at smaller organizations, development directors are often doing a lot of the fundraising tasks because there are few additional team members. This means those jobs require a lot of prioritization of the limited budget and staff resources available.

“You just can’t do everything,” she says. “You need to take a step back and look at where are we seeing the most revenue growth and how can we capitalize on that. If it’s grants, then you should be putting most of your energy into grants.”

The size of the organization may also change the title of the job. For example, development director is often used at small or midsize organizations, says Kari McAvoy, also a partner at EMD Consulting. At bigger organizations, director of development is also called the chief development officer.

Director of development positions are sometimes also advertised as a director of philanthropy, Grass says. If the position is listed as director of advancement, she says, that typically includes everything the director of development does, but “they also have marketing and communications under them.”

Key Skills Development Directors Need

The key skill that nonprofits want to see in an applicant’s background is fundraising.

Jami Armstrong, a senior consultant with Impact Search Advisors by NonprofitHR, says nonprofits often turn to her company because salespeople who believe their skills will translate are applying for their open director of development positions. But, she says, nonprofits want someone with a proven track record of raising money.

“They want someone who can come in here and hit the ground running,” Armstrong says, not someone they need to teach.

The best candidates, she says, demonstrate their expertise by talking about key campaigns they’ve run or been a part of, donations they’ve helped cultivate, or grants they’ve secured. They also need to show they understand the key elements of a successful fundraising team — even if they haven’t held every position themselves — and that they can analyze fundraising data and make changes based on the data.

“You may have a really strong grant writer on the team, so the director of development may not be doing this,” Armstrong says. “But they have a strong understanding and are well positioned to be a thought partner. There’s a lot of data analysis that goes into this job. Then there’s the soft skills. You need to understand building strong relationships.”

The ability to nurture rich relationships with donors is critical for directors of development — and something nonprofits are really looking for in candidates, according to everyone the Chronicle spoke with. Having a background that includes developing one-on-one relationships with donors is incredibly helpful, Grass says.

“They want to know that you have great relationship-building qualities and that you are capable of making a graceful and effective fundraising ask,” she says. “Those are the most difficult skills to replicate and the most valuable for almost any organization of any size.”

Nonprofits also want to see that development director candidates have managed staff, Grass says, “even if you’re managing an intern or a part-time staff person.” She says applicants need to be able to answer questions like: How do you manage? How do you grow and maintain a team? How do you retain employees? Having experience managing will help you answer those types of questions.

“If people can find an opportunity for even a small staff-management role, that’ll be hugely important as they advance in their careers,” Grass says.

The emphasis on management skills is relatively new, McAvoy says. “That ability to supervise and build a strong team wasn’t on the top list of things some years ago, but it is today,” she says. “The culture has changed.”

Multiple Ways to Get There

Like so many career paths in fundraising, reaching the director of development level isn’t a rigid, linear progression. Cultivating the necessary skills is crucial, but how fundraisers acquire them can vary widely.

Grass says people often start with entry-level positions, such as development assistant, annual-giving coordinator, or donor-relations associate. Those jobs are focused on fundraising operations, donor communications, and events. Then fundraisers move into midlevel roles, such as major-gifts officer, donor-stewardship manager, or grants manager, where they build donor relationships, manage retention strategies, and lead solicitations. With those experiences under their belt, they advance to senior leadership roles, such as associate director of development, major-gifts director, or campaign manager. These roles focus on fundraising strategy, team leadership, and donor pipeline management.

“A lot of places will have people who have regional territories, where your full-time job is traveling to ask people for money,” Grass says. “That was one of the steps that I had in my career. I had a portfolio of donors, and my entire job was to try to get to know them, understand what they cared about, see if we could get a gift either renewed or increased for the organization.”

Any type of nonprofit work where employees talk to people about the mission is helpful in moving into fundraising leadership roles, McAvoy says. She’s also seen people segue into fundraising roles from the program side, where they interacted with both volunteers and program recipients. “They’re passionate about the mission,” she says. A deep commitment to the mission is a key element that helps connect donors and fundraisers, she notes, so having that built-in passion often translates well to fundraising roles.

Liz Clark, director of development and alumni relations at the Prospect Sierra School in El Cerrito, Calif., worked her way up to her current position. She started her career as a cartographer but lost her job with the rise of Google Maps. The school, which her child attended, was looking for someone to help in the development department two days a week. Clark worked under a development director and annual fund manager. When the annual fund manager left, Clark took on those responsibilities, including working with donors. Eventually, when the director of development left, Clark, who knew the 400-student school well, along with many of its donors and the fundraising program, stepped into the role.

Clark is doing both strategy and hands-on work because it’s a small team. For her, the keys to the job are being “able to wear a lot of hats” and being comfortable having one-on-one conversations with donors, alumni, and potential supporters.

Young fundraisers looking to gather the skills needed to get into this position may want to take a page from the Hamilton song “The Room Where It Happens.” Martin Kenny recommends young professionals try to tag along on the visits and meetings where crucial fundraising takes place.

“One of the reasons why I’ve been successful is early on in my career, I would have an executive director say, ‘Why don’t you come to this donor meeting with me, not to take notes, just to listen and see what it looks like to ask somebody for a $1 million gift or a $50,000 gift,’” she says.

She adds that being offered those opportunities — or asking to join in — will help young fundraisers build the skills they need to become directors of development and take on other leadership roles.

“Senior-level people are starting to leave the sector entirely or going into consulting,” Martin Kenny says. “Giving young people those opportunities — that’s something that we really need to get back to so that we can start building the next generation of good fundraising leaders.”